Desktop publishing tools have made document production easier and more widespread. In an ideal workflow for desktop publishing, any document opened on any machine in any application would have the correct fonts activated with the document and have error-free printing. Unfortunately, such an ideal workflow does not exist at present due to problems with font identification within documents.
Using the “wrong” font can cause a document to image incorrectly. Thus, the problems with font identification extend to documents provided in a plethora of environments, including HTML (hyper text markup language) page “documents” and text packet “documents” downloaded to set-top boxes, for example. The wrong font is one whose data (metrics, glyphs, encoding, etc.) differ from the original font such that text won't image in the same manner as with the original font. With most applications in the computing environment today, fonts are referenced using the name of the font. For example, in a QuarkXPress or Adobe Illustrator document, any fonts used within the document are referenced by the document using the font's name as the key, e.g., if a document used Bauhaus Bold as a font, the name Bauhaus Bold will be referenced within the document. Whenever that document is opened by the application, the application will make a request to the Operating System for a font with the referenced name, e.g. Bauhaus Bold.
While the inclusion of the font name does allow for a rudimentary identification of the font used, a problem arises from the fact that the font name is not unique within the font name space. In other words, there may be numerous fonts that go by the same name, e.g., Bauhaus Bold, that, in fact, behave in different ways. While these fonts may actually be fairly close in specification, the differences can be sufficient to cause some drastic problems. For example, if the width tables of the two Bauhaus Bold fonts are different, the horizontal line spacing could be different when the document is imaged with the incorrect Bauhaus Bold font. The end result could be as drastic as paragraphs of text missing their last line. The ramifications of this, and the potential liability, can be, and often is, quite significant.
Embedding the entire font within a document is a possibility that exists in order to avoid problems with incorrect font identification. Unfortunately, fonts are copyrighted and are licensed for use. By embedding the fonts within documents, there is huge potential for copyright infringement and very little protection for the intellectual property that is the font, since the documents may be used in a variety of worksites. Further, font files can be large, and therefore, embedding all the necessary font files within a document can result in very large document files, as well as a lot of redundancy, since many documents share the same fonts.
Accordingly, a need exists for a method and system for uniquely identifying fonts in a meaningful and efficient manner and for avoiding problems that mismatched fonts cause in document exchange. The present invention addresses such a need.